Race Rats

Oh dear! "Immigrants must learn to be British," screams a headline in London's Daily Mail. "New immigrants will soon have to pass English exams and formally swear allegiance to the Crown," is the subhed.

Substitute the word American for British, and you'll have the p.c. police and the liberal press hot on your tail. In the land of opportunity, that is. Not that the Brits are about to get away with it. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has described the idea of compulsory English lessons as "clearly divisive and it goes against the fabric of multicultural society." This in a week that saw London turn into Chicago circa the Al Capone era, with a 25-year-old businessman murdered in front of his girlfriend during a carjacking, the nanny and six-year-old son of the editor of Vogue attacked and their car stolen, and a mother of three left unconscious at the roadside in broad daylight as robbers drove off in her Mercedes. All three attacks were perpetrated by Afro-Caribbeans, forcing the politically correct English newspapers to describe the carjackers as black. Before that, violent incidents were focused on mobile phone theft, with a woman being shot in the head by muggers who wanted her Nokia. London police figures showed that muggings rose in the capital by 43 percent compared with a year before: 4700 in October alone, and the figures are rising by the minute.

Street crime in England is exploding not because mobile telephones and expensive cars are too easy to steal, but because the forces of law and order are losing control of the streets. When I was attacked by three young toughs who spoke some kind of Jamaican patois back in 1995, I had the opportunity to discuss the problem with the fuzz who arrived well after the three had fled. "It all has to do with the 'sus' law being suspended," they told me. The "sus" law being the right of a police officer to stop a suspect and search him. Due to p.c. pressure and race hustlers within Parliament, officer after officer was dragged in front of the Race Relations Board and branded a racist. This in a city where 75 percent of crimes are perpetrated by young Afro-Caribbeans, many of them recent arrivals from their islands in the sun. No sooner did the numbers of "stop and search" fall than muggings and serious crime went out of control. Now the Home Office is being urged to have police forces patrolling more intensely (the fuzz had retired to their computers, watching street cameras), but the battle has been lost. There are no Rudy Giulianis in Blighty, just lotsa multiculturalism and politically correct politicians.

Back home things are not nearly as bad, not that the multiculturalists and the bleeding hearts are not trying. Last I heard, the number of foreign-born residents and children of immigrants in the United States had reached the highest level in history: 56 million from 34 million in the last three decades. Just think. Mexico accounts for more than a quarter of all the foreign-born residents, the largest share any country has had since the 1890 census, when about 30 percent of America's foreign born were from Germany. Needless to say, California and New York lead the states. This in turn means that anti-racist education is further indoctrinating students to the so-called iniquities of Western civilization, leaving the already embattled white students ashamed of their own identity and culture.

Let's face it. Multiculturalism has fueled social and racial conflict, no ifs or buts about it. Polymath pundits like one William Pfaff, writing out of Paris for American liberal newspapers, tend to explain multiculturalism as a response to the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War. Instead of saying sorry to blacks and to the Vietnamese, Uncle Sam chose "to provide? a re-evaluation of formerly neglected or despised cultures."

Well, I beg to differ. As Pfaff later states, "Multicultural education was well-meant but superficial and often ignorant, with unfortunate consequences not only on school policy, but also on immigration policy." Unfortunate is an egregious understatement, and the harm that has been done in education and immigration policies has changed this country for the worse in ways still not comprehended by our leaders. And it was never well-meant. The p.c. and multicultural crowd saw it as an opportunity to silence conservatism, to destroy the family and to discredit patriotism once and for all.

I remember going to the great Paul Johnson's London house and discussing it more than 10 years ago. He called it a passing fad. For once he was wrong. It was a coup d'etat that worked. And continues to. However cynical this may sound, the only good thing to come out of Sept. 11 is that some well-meaning fools might have woken up. Now we have Americans adapting to immigrant cultures, rather than the other way around, and the coup-makers in their tenured cloisters are cheering. Divide and conquer is an old trick, and what they hope to profit from dividing American society may be unclear to useful idiots, but not to me. The only way to counter them is by recreating Christendom in America and denying pop culture. But that is a far broader subject I will tackle on a later date.